- Contact is the culmination of Vancouver's recent dance music explosion—something that's been brewing in the underground for over a decade and has just crossed over to the mainstream in a big way. Like a miniature Electric Daisy Carnival, the festival is billed as the biggest party in Western Canada. When it launched in 2012, an event this size in Vancouver was practically unthinkable. The first year skewed towards the ultra-mainstream, with Deadmau5, Alesso et al, a formula that was successful enough for Contact to expand to two days this year. With the extra runtime came a more diverse set of artists, crossing trap, dubstep, house and EDM-by-numbers.
Walking up to the venue—aglow from the outside with spectrum analyzer visualizations—it was hard not to be in awe. Contact engulfs all of BC Place, an Olympic stadium that's home to Vancouver's football and soccer teams, and that was too big even for the festival's 12,000-person capacity. Wandering through throngs of glowing partiers and scantily clad teenagers in the face of crazed strobe lights was an experience in itself. An all-ages event of this size will always lack a certain vibe, but everyone seemed to be on their best behaviour, and having a room full of excited kids creates an infectious energy of its own.
Aside from a stage so big that you could barely see the DJs (save for the video screens), the festival's spartan decor made it feel like they'd dropped the stage into the stadium and called it a day. The sound was remarkably clear for such a huge space, but it's easy to imagine all the little extras they could have put in the far-flung corners of the room, which instead were marked by empty patches of concrete.
Cashmere Cat helped open the first day with a remarkably chilled-out and sexy set of his R&B and hip-hop. Contrast that with MakJ the next night, who dropped "Smells Like Teen Spirit" twice amidst electro bootlegs of Foreigner and Lorde. Skrillex was remarkable in the headlining slot, with an infectious stage presence that outshone his rather tiresome array of distorted basslines. Baauer and RL Grime fared the best, balancing the crowd's hunger for huge drops with a forward-thinking repertoire.
Dirty South and Dada Life's generic electro house were both so unremarkable they barely deserve mention. Kaskade underperformed as a headliner for the second night, dropping a set of cheese-ball house that made me wish Skrillex would come back for a second round. Therein lies another issue—with only one room of programming, no re-entry and no lounge away from the music (barring an overcrowded food court that seemed to serve only french fries), the audience was stuck in the one main space the entire time, with no option to skip a set you might not care about.
Though there were still a few kinks to be worked out, Contact 2013 was an improvement over its first year in nearly every respect. Once you were in, the security and bar staff were remarkably friendly, meaning you felt welcome and appreciated, which isn't how giant festivals usually work. Even a heavy-duty police contingent couldn't quash the energy. With music programming still very much on the commercial side of things, Contact is not a destination for house snobs or serious techno heads. But for an event of its scale, it was more open-minded than it had to be, and in a notoriously cagey city like Vancouver, that it could even exist is heartening in itself.